''I am emotionally shocked but I have no trouble in believing that this many people have been killed,'' said Scott Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern University, who works on the www.iraqbodycount.net project.

That project, which collates only deaths reported in the news media, currently put the maximum civilian death toll at just under 17,000. ''We've always maintained that the actual count must be much higher,'' Mr. Lipscomb said (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/euro...).